The area of medicine and particularly that field of human medicine devoted to individual and public health has long sought a non-toxic compound which would permit the control of body weight and which would act in such a way as to permit persons to eat in a normal fashion but still lose weight, the usual intent of such weight reduction being to reduce personal weight within the weight range recommended by the medical profession as desirable for particular heights and ages.
While various compounds have heretofore been suggested and/or utilized with a view toward causing loss of body weight, none of these compounds have proved to be completely successful in accomplishing the desired end and more particularly in providing a non-toxic compound that controls body weight yet permits the person to eat in that person's normally accustomed manner.
A few years ago, this inventor invented a novel sulfur-containing compound and method for the preparation of the same, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,243,425 was issued to me on Mar. 29, 1966, the invention being assigned to Purdue Research Foundation. The sulfur compounds of that invention are based upon the replacement of an oxygen atom in a sugar molecule by a sulfur atom, and, more specifically, are based upon the replacement of the ring oxygen of the sugar by the sulfur atom and oxidized forms of the sulfur atom and thus may be described as thiosugars.
While the compounds described in my U.S. Pat. No. 3,243,425 were recognized to be of both chemical and biochemical interest as sugar analogs, the then recognized use of the compounds was primarily in the preparation of resins by reaction with a diisocyanate or other polyisocyanates, with usefulness as radiation absorbers and as chain terminators in free radical polymerizations being mentioned. It has remained until now, however, to find and develop usefulness for particular forms of such compounds, and particularly to find and develop 5-Thio-D-glucose for the purposes hereinafter described.